“The Commissioner’s ruling today did nothing to address the legal deficiencies of due process. The NFL remains stuck with the following facts: the NFL had no policy that applied to players, the NFL provided no notice of any such policy or potential discipline to players, the NFL resorted to a nebulous standard of ‘general awareness’ to predicate a legally unjustified punishment, the NFL had no procedures in place until two days ago to test air pressure in footballs and the NFL violated the plain meaning of the collective bargaining agreement.

The fact that the NFL would resort to basing a suspension on a smoke screen of irrelevant text messages instead of admitting that they have all of the phone records they asked for is a new low, even for them, but it does nothing to correct their errors. The NFLPA will appeal this outrageous decision on behalf of Tom Brady.”

Tom Brady’s agent, Don Yee, again tore into the NFL on Tuesday stating: “The Commissioner’s decision is deeply disappointing, but not surprising because the appeal process was thoroughly lacking in procedural fairness. More importantly neither Tom nor the Patriots did anything wrong. And the NFL has no evidence that anything inappropriate occurred … the appeal process was a sham, resulting in the Commissioner rubber-stamping his own decision … the science in the Wells Report was junk … All of the electronic information [we gave the NFL] was ignored; we don’t know why. The extent to which Tom opened up his private life to the Commissioner will become clear in the coming days.”